Niantic has recently announced that they’re releasing updates for Pokémon GO on Android (version 0.61.0) and iOS (version 1.31.0). As the update is slowly rolling out, we’ve prepared a data mining report. Brace yourself, this one is massive. Also, we did not find any evidence of a possible Easter event.

Be aware that reading this data mining report will reveal in game spoilers for upcoming events. Reader discretion is advised. You can find the raw diff here.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Redeemable codes

We first encountered redeemable codes in our 0.59.1 data mine, detailing how redeemable codes are written. We also know what redeemable codes can reward: Items, Avatar Swag, Candy, Stardust and PokéCoins.

With 0.61.0 we learned a few new things:

redeemable codes are tested and ready to release!

codes are redeemed via the in game shop

there are two or more types of redeemable codes (promotional, etc)

First evidence of testing came from exception messages found in the APK, noting a few errors that the game throws if the redeemable code was already consumed:

According to image data we found, or rather the lack of it, the button will be constructed using existing UI elements in the game, so no further client side updates are needed.

Personal notification inbox

Apart from Redeemable codes, Niantic used this release to introduce the Notification Inbox, a one stop hub for all Notifications submitted by Niantic.

The notification inbox includes the following categories:

Marketing

Announcement

Admin Note

Game Event

Unset Category

And those notifications can have three different status states:

Unread

Expiring Soon

Immediate

This feature goes hand in hand with the Redeemable codes support, as Niantic needs a way to notify players of upcoming, important and soon-to-expire codes and events. This feature doesn’t look completely done yet, but it’s still a notable addition.

PokéStops rewards rewrite

For no apparent reason, the whole code behind PokéStop rewards bubble was rewritten and optimized. We are not sure why this was done, it’s possible it was a required change for other bug fixes.

The code features several animation and sound optimizations, but in essence, it’s still the same behaviour as it was before.

Sky rendering changes

There were significant changes to the in game skybox rendering. There is no indication this is connected with the previously leaked sunset animations, but it has potential to move in that direction.

Performance improvements and bug fixes

Without going into technical details, there were numerous performance improvements and bug fixes all across the board. We’ve observed the following:

Gyms battles now work without much lag

Dodge has been fixed

Egg collection dates are now correct

App loading time was improved

However, not all players are reporting the same. This is still being researched, but early reports indicate that the game is very buggy on Sony Xperia phones, especially lower end ones.

A new loading screen was added!

And finally, after months of looking at the Winter loading screen, Niantic has finally introduced a new loading screen featuring Steelix! This loading screen appears without clearing the cache and local app data.

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